Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2015

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Linda Nagata, The Trials

Sequel to First Light, where the consequences of that adventure come home to roost. — If I say that these novels are near-future military hard science fiction, full of descriptions of imaginary technologies and of stuff blowing up, and clearly inspired by an anxious vision of America's ongoing decline, I am being perfectly truthful, and yet also quite misleading. People who enjoy books which fall under that rubric will find it very much the sort of thing they like; at the same time, normally I'd pay to avoid having to read such works, and yet found these two quite compelling, and eagerly await the conclusion.

ObLinkage: Nagata's self-presentation.

Letizia Battaglia, Passion, Justice, Freedom --- Photographs of Sicily

Battaglia comes across as a bit of a crazy woman, but in a deeply admirable way; and, of course, a tremendous photographer.

Paul McAuley, In the Mouth of the Whale

Hard-SF space opera, set in the same future as his terrific The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but many centuries later. (He's good at filling in enough of the back-story to make it separately readable.) In this book, we're plunged into a conflict over the star system around Fomalhaut among four different more-or-less-post-more-or-less-human clades, seen from three points of view, two of which prove to be peripheral grunts. (Spoiler: Jung, rneyl ba, nccrnef gb or bar bs gur zbfg uhzna ivrjcbvagf cebirf, va snpg, gb or cebsbhaqyl fgenatr, gubhtu guvf vf fbzrguvat ernqref bs gur cerivbhf obbx pbhyq thrff.) I thought it was very good, though not quite as great as those two earlier books.

Edward K. Muller (ed.), An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail

A decent collection of essays, and really pretty photos, on the natural and human history of what is today a bike route from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland (and so on to Washignton, D.C.), but has had a lot of other incarnations over the centuries. Of only local interest, but locally interesting.

ObSnapshots: From a bike trip last year.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

Mind candy mystery: In which the Satanic panic of the 1980s meets the economic collapse of family farming, and makes for something bitterly poisonous and engrossing. (Though arguably not as poisonous as some of what actually happened back then.)

Carolyn Drake, Wild Pigeon

Photos, collages and a translated story, meant to illustrate the contemporary life of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Bought from the author; I learned about it from the New York Review blog.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce

I picked up this middle volume of a trilogy, without having read the first book, because someone left it in a free-books pile at work, and I was curious. Whoever got rid of their copy: thanks. This is a truly fascinating look at the development of the market economy and capitalism in early modern Europe, and to some extent in the rest of the old world at the same time, full of fascinating information (*) and perspectives, as well as chewy and questionable hypotheses.

One notable feature, for me, is that Braudel wants to distinguish between the development of a market economy and the development of capitalism. He does this not to suggest an early-modern pre-history for market socialism, but because he identifies capitalism with "the realm of investment and of a high rate of capital formation", i.e., the activities of men, and of firms, who made substantial investments of money which resulted, or could result, in high rates of return. This was, in this period, in finance (especially financing the developing sovereign territorial states), in long-distance trade, and in monopolies. These were activities which could hardly have gotten off the ground without a large market economy around them, but where competition was precisely what one would want to avoid...

I wish someone had told me before this that Braudel was a good writer, and not just an important historian. Also: I'd have given a lot to see what he might have made of the "new international trade theory" and "new economic geography", which were just forming at the time he was writing.

*: The bit on p. 556 where he says that a "prohibition on lending at interest" was a "condition not present in Islam" was rather boggling, and does leave me wondering about the accuracy of some of his other statements.

Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes

The story of the American conquest of Hawaii, told in Vowell's signature style. (It works better read aloud than on the silent page.) With many thanks to "Uncle Jan" for my copy.

Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

Mind candy: space opera, in which the Culture, in its own inimitable fashion, harrows Hell. Somewhat longer, I think, than it needed to be, but still compulsively readable.

Amanda Downum, Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

Mind candy, at the urban fantasy / horror border, in which Vancouver's art scene confronts an outbreak from the dungeon dimensions — or, more exactly, Carcosa. I quite enjoyed how Downum is able to use pretty much the full canonical Cthulhu Mythos, from the seventy steps down to the Dreamlands to night-gaunts and everything else, and manage to make it seem not a formulaic exercise but genuinely creepy. (And I mean "creepy" in the "hairs standing on the back of the neck" sense, not the "bigoted distant connection at Thanksgiving" [*] sense, which says something considering the source material.) I have the impression this novel didn't make much of an impact when it came out, but if so that's unfair.

*: Of course I'm not thinking of you, dear distant connection with whom I have shared Thanksgiving.

Kelley Armstrong, Deceptions

Mind-candy contemporary fantasy in which discovering that her biological parents are convicted serial killers is the least of the protagonist's problems. (Previously.)

Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

This is a very nicely done popular history of not just the teaching profession but also of the public schools, and just why both have been such a point of political contention for so long — and why we keep trying incredibly similar fixes time after time. Because it's not an academic tome, it doesn't attempt to be altogether comprehensive, rather a series of portraits of particular episodes, but so far as an interested non-expert can judge, those episodes are well-chosen and the background to the portraits accurate.

(I read this a year ago, but forgot to blog it.)

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; The Beloved Republic; The Dismal Science; The Great Transformation; Heard about Pittsburgh PA; Afghanistan and Central Asia; Cthulhiana; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; Corrupting the Young

"Robust Confidence Intervals via Kendall's Tau for Transelliptical Graphical Models" (Next Week at the Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Publicity for an upcoming academic talk, of interest only if (1) you care about quantifying uncertainty in statistics, and (2) will be in Pittsburgh on Monday.

I am late in publicizing this, but hope it will help drum up attendance anyway:

Mladen Kolar, "Robust Confidence Intervals via Kendall's Tau for Transelliptical Graphical Models"

Abstract: Undirected graphical models are used extensively in the biological and social sciences to encode a pattern of conditional independences between variables, where the absence of an edge between two nodes $a$ and $b$ indicates that the corresponding two variables $X_a$ and $X_b$ are believed to be conditionally independent, after controlling for all other measured variables. In the Gaussian case, conditional independence corresponds to a zero entry in the precision matrix $\Omega$ (the inverse of the covariance matrix $\Sigma$). Real data often exhibits heavy tail dependence between variables, which cannot be captured by the commonly-used Gaussian or nonparanormal (Gaussian copula) graphical models. In this paper, we study the transelliptical model, an elliptical copula model that generalizes Gaussian and nonparanormal models to a broader family of distributions. We propose the ROCKET method, which constructs an estimator of $\Omega_{ab}$ that we prove to be asymptotically normal under mild assumptions. Empirically, ROCKET outperforms the nonparanormal and Gaussian models in terms of achieving accurate inference on simulated data. We also compare the three methods on real data (daily stock returns), and find that the ROCKET estimator is the only method whose behavior across subsamples agrees with the distribution predicted by the theory. (Joint work with Rina Foygel Barber.)

Time and place: 4--5 pm on Monday, 28 September 2015, in Doherty Hall 1112.

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Enigmas of Chance

On the Nature of Things Humanity Was Not Meant to Know

Attention conservation notice: A ponderous, scholastic joke, which could only hope to be amusing to those who combine a geeky enthusiasm for over-written horror stories from the early 20th century with nerdy enthusiasm for truly ancient books.

I wish to draw attention to certain parallels between De Rerum Natura, an ancient epic and didactic poem expounding a philosophy which is blasphemous according to nearly^* every religion, and the Necronomicon, a fictitious book of magic supposedly expounding a doctrine which is blasphemous according to nearly^** every religion.

The Necronomicon was, of course, invented by H. P. Lovecraft for his stories in the 1920s and 1930s. In his mythos, it was written by the mad poet "Abdul Alhazred", who died in +738 by being torn apart by invisible monsters. The book then led a twisty life through a thin succession of manuscript copies and translations, rare and almost lost. The book was, supposedly, full of the horrible, nearly indescribable, secrets of the universe: explaining how the world is an uncaring yet quite material place, in which the Earth's past and future are full of monsters, but natural monsters, how the reign of humanity is a transient episode, and the gods are in reality powerful extra-terrestrial beings, without any particular care for humanity. Reading the Necronomicon drives one mad, or at the very least the frightful knowledge it imparts permanently warps the mind. There are, supposedly, about half-a-dozen copies in existence, kept under lock and key (except when the story requires otherwise).

De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") is an entirely real book, written by the poet Titus Lucretius Carus around -55; according to legend, the poet went mad and died as a result of taking a love potion. The book thereafter led a twisty life through a thin trail of manuscript copies, and was almost lost over the course of the middle ages. The book is quite definitely full of what Lucretius thought of as the secrets of the universe (whose resistance to description is a running theme): how the entire universe is material and everything arises from the fortuitous concourse of atoms, how every phenomenon not matter how puzzling has a rational and material explanation, how there is no after-life to fear. It describes how the Earth's past was full of thoroughly-natural monsters, the reign of humanity and even the existence of the Earth is a transient episode, and how the gods are in reality powerful extra-terrestrial beings without any particular care for humanity, living (a Lovecraftian touch) in the spaces between worlds. In the centuries since its recovery, it has been retrospectively elevated into one of the great books of the Western civilization (whatever that is).

If we are to believe the latest historian of its reception, reading De Rerum Natura started out as an innocent pursuit of more elegant Latin, but ended up permanently warping the greatest minds of Renaissance Europe. The inescapable conclusion is that the Enlightenment is the result of the real-life Necronomicon, a book full of things humanity was not meant to know, using the printing revolution of early modern Europe to take over the intellectual world, until (in the words of the lesser poet) "all the earth ... flame[d] with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom". Of course the same thing looks different from the point of view of us cultists:

And thus you will gain knowledge, guided by a little labor,
For one thing will illuminate the next, and blinding night
Won't steal your way; all secrets will be opened to your sight,
One truth illuminate another, as light kindles light.

*: I insert the qualifier for the sake of my Unitarian Universalist friends. ^

**: I insert the qualifier for the sake of my Unitarian Universalist friends. ^

---

Spoiling the conceit: I have no reason to believe that Lovecraft was thinking of Lucretius at any point in writing any of his stories featuring the Necronomicon, or even that the history of De Rerum Natura influenced the "forbidden tome" motif which Lovecraft drew on (and amplified). I also do not think that the Enlightenment is really about "shouting and killing and revelling in joy". (Though it would be its own kind of betrayal of the Enlightenment for one of its admirers, like me, not to face up to the ways some of its ideas have been used to justify very great evils, particularly when Europeans imposed themselves on less powerful peoples elsewhere.) Rather, this is all the result of the collision in my head of Ada Palmer's interview by Henry Farrell with Palmer's earlier appreciation of Ruthanna Emrys's "Litany of Earth", plus Ken MacLeod's cometary Lucretian deities, and early imprinting on Bruce Sterling.

Finally, I would pay good money to read the alternate history where it was the Necronomicon which humanists discovered mouldering in a monastic library and revived, where its ideas are as thoroughly normalized, pervasive and surpassed as Lucretius's are, and copies of Kitab al-Azif can be found in any bookstore as a Penguin Classic, translated by a distinguished contemporary poet. Failing that, I would like to read Lucretius's explanation of why we need have no fear of shoggoths.

Manual trackback: Metafilter

Modest Proposals; Cthulhiana; The Great Transformation

"Reproducibility and Reliability in Statistical and Data Driven Research" (Week after Next Coming Soon at the Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Publicity for an upcoming academic talk, of interest only if (1) you will be in Pittsburgh and (2) you care about whether scientific research can be reproduced.

The timeliness of the opening talk of this year's statistics seminar is, in fact, an un-reproducible, if welcome, coincidence:

Victoria Stodden, "Reproducibility and Reliability in Statistical and Data Driven Research"

Abstract: The reproducibility and computational inferences from data is widely recognized as an emerging issue in the scientific reliability of results. This talk will motivate the rationale for this shift, and outline the problem of reproducibility. I will then present ongoing research on several solutions: empirical research on data and code publication; the pilot project for large scale validation of statistical findings; and the "Reproducible Research Standard" for ensuring the distribution of legally re-usable data and code. If time permits, I will present early results assessing the reproducibility of published computational findings. Some of this research is described in my co-edited books, Implementing Reproducible Research and Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good.

Time and place: 4--5 pm on Monday, 14 September 2015, in Doherty Hall 1112 see below

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Update, 14 September: Prof. Stodden's talk has had to be rescheduled; I will post an update with the new date once I know it.

Enigmas of Chance; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts